BSAVA Congress with Graham

First of all, if you've never been, I would recommend visiting Manchester, the city centre is very pedestrian friendly (traffic is very limited and there's a great tram system), there are some magnificent buildings, and there's a wide variety of entertainment and night life to cater for all tastes.

To turn to the Congress, previously when I attended the same event in Birmingham many years ago, it was mainly an educational event with a large commercial exhibition. These days, these are still very much part of it, but the lectures are much more wide ranging in topic, and you can avail yourself of a massage, a relaxing moment or two in a quiet room, cookery demonstrations and many other less overtly specifically veterinary activities.

While I attended a number of veterinary medical talks on various topics such as feline viral disease, dental problems and nutrition to get the latest information on these subjects from world renowned experts in their fields, there was quite a few talks centred around various aspects of the wider environmental impact of the veterinary profession and the human health implications of this, several of which were to do with the use of parasite treatments on pets.

Despite some of these drugs having been banned in agriculture for some time, they are being found in increasing quantities in our water and environment, and it appears the source is at least partly from treatments being applied to pets. While there is no confirmed link to any harm or health issues, it is suspected there may be a risk of these and further research is being done to clarify and quantify this.
As part of our ongoing pro-active approach at Westport, we will be discussing and reviewing our parasite control plans soon in light of this and may be changing how we address this with our FOWP health plans and the treatments we supply through this.

Unfortunately, as with many of these topics, there is no simple one size fits all solution, and there are recognised and clear benefits in the use of parasite controls in pets both for their health, as well as that of their owners and other humans and animals, despite the potential risks noted above.

To finish off with, I would mention we had Professor Hannah Fry give the keynote lecture titled 'The Future', which was describing various aspects of how artificial intelligence might be of genuine benefit to us. One of the topics discussed was it's use in helping us understand how animals communicate (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2024-09-19/animal-communication-the-future-with-hannah-fry-video) and she introduced us to a 'talking' dog called Chace (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvaeLLmFqQq1JdH0eupzG2w). The whole talk was very thought provoking and I would recommend, if you have a spare few minutes, to have a look at the links provided and maybe consider the implications of actually being able to talk to and be understood by our pets and other animals.